


The Time Wizard of Chiswick

by Kittywitch



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: AU, Gen, I can't write urban fantasy what is this, Other, urban fantasy au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:13:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26549548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kittywitch/pseuds/Kittywitch
Summary: Donna Noble, a normal woman living in 2007, is forced to hire the services of an eccentric "Time Wizard", a man who claims to be able to use a mixture of magic and technology to travel in time,  in order to save her grandfather from having to fight in World War One.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 6





	1. Off to See the Wizard

Donna looked up at the sign again, asking herself if she was really going to go through with it. It’s not that she didn’t believe that there was such a thing as a “Time Wizard”, not after what happened to her grandfather, but she had difficulty believing that they would live in the dingy front-entrance basement under a closed Tarot shop with no more announcement to their supposedly great powers than a blue neon sign flickering wildly with a faint buzz. The sign read “ _JOHN SMITH TIME WIZARD_ ” in italic capitals and was no larger than a sheet of A4, hanging in the front window next to the dingy little door.

She sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. Wilf was counting on her, and she couldn’t leave even the tackiest stone unturned. As she pressed into the storefront, her nose was filled with the dusty smell of an old bookshop, but what met her eyes looked more like the underside of an automobile pit, with wiring and piping from a hundred unrecognisable machines lining the walls and stacked up like books in a labyrinth across the floor. In the centre of this grimy, thick mess crouched an incongruously tidy-looking man in a tight pinstriped suit. A head of spiky brown hair popped up from behind a stack of what looked for all the world like 80s CPU towers, half-covered by a pair of almost buglike giant round goggles.

“What are you doing here?” the strange man squeaked, sounding almost offended.

“Are you John Smith?” Donna asked, dreading the answer.

“And you’re supposed to be the... the ‘time wizard’?”

“That’s what it says on the door.”

“And does that mean you’re just very good at scheduling, or can you actually help me?”

“Not with your scheduling. I’m terrible at getting where I’m supposed to be.”

“And how about getting _other_ people where they’re supposed to be. Or when?”

“Well, which is it?” he asked, long legs stepping over impossibly high stacks of junk.

“Well, it’s when isn’t it? Or I’d be looking for a private eye and not a time wizard.” She opened her purse and fumbled around past pens and sunblock and a wrench she had no better place to carry than in her purse, before pulling out an old, worn photograph.

“It’s my grandad. Here he is in World War I.” she explained, showing Smith the faded photograph. Smith pulled his goggles onto the top of his head to get a better look at the photo, allowing Donna a better look at him. He looked like the kind of man her friends would insist looked handsome and not like an underfed whippet, despite looking very very much like an underfed whippet.

“You don’t look old enough to have had a grandad in World War I.” 

“I’m not! He’s only in his sixties!” Donna exploded. The wizard looked at Donna as if he had only just noticed she was there. He turned his eyes back to the photograph and blanched.

“Wait... that’s Wilf! I know Wilf!” Smith said suddenly. “I met him in 1917!”

“ _You_ don’t look old enough to have been in World War I.”

“Time wizard. Wilf’s a mate of mine, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. What’s he doing in a war?” Smith squawked bouncing around his messy shop. “I’ve got to get him out of there before he hurts himself... or worse, could end up with no grandkids at all. He loved his grandkids!”

“Which would be bad for me.” said Donna, “Or did you forget I was here, time boy?”

“I’ve got to cast a circle right away and get him out of there.” Smith muttered, running his hand through his hair, which explained why it was standing on end.

“Well, isn’t this just _wizard._ ” Donna grumbled, following Smith into the backroom of the shop.


	2. Let's Do the Time Warp

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Smith the Wizard casts a spell to send himself and Donna back in time.

It was nearly impossible to reach the back room of Smith’s… establishment? Storefront? Having seen her first one about two minutes previous, Donna wasn’t sure what a time wizard called their place of work. She wasn’t sure where to put her feet, as cleaning obviously meant something very different to Smith than it did to her.

“My name’s Donna Noble, since you didn’t ask,” she said pointedly, stepping over a two-foot tall stack of dot matrix paper, still in a single piece but covered in faded black symbols she didn’t recognise.

“Well, Ms. Noblesinceyoudidn’task, what’s your granddad doing in 1917?”

“That’s what I came to you to find out!” she retorted crossly. “Who’s the time wizard here, me or you?”

“You know, that’s something I get asked a lot these days.” Smith replied.

The word “hoarder” came to mind, but Donna hoped that if one was a time wizard one had reasons to keep pieces of tech that looked like they ranged from before Donna’s birth to just after she started working. She spotted a Macintosh SE from her childhood and was pretty sure that if she could recognise a Commodre 64 on sight and had a week and a pith helmet to look for it in this mess she could have found one. coiled telephone cords wrapped around the stacks like ropes on shipping crates. She couldn’t be sure which if any of them were plugged in or even still worked, but occasionally she thought she caught a flicker from a screen and the grandfather clock at the centre of the maze of junk was ticking away as merrily as it ever had. It was a maze, not metaphorically, but literally, in setting up these stacks of assorted junk there were clear deliberate paths and crossways. The room was lit with flickering bare lightbulbs and a single accountant’s lamp stood on top of a chest-high stack of hardbound leather books.

They reached a clearing in the mess, showing a circle about a metre and a half across of worn brown and red carpet. As Donna began to gratefully step over he tottering stacks of assorted tech and into the clearing, Smith held out his arm.

“Don’t step directly in the circle before it’s been cast, I don’t know where you’d end up.” he warned.

“What do you mean, ‘before it’s been cast’? You haven’t done anything magic since I got here.” Donna said crossly. Smith slowly levelled his gaze at her.

“I don’t _have_ to do anything to make it dangerous. The circle is going to be magic whether I tell the magic what to do or not.”

He picked up a pocket watch off a lamp, where it had been hanging from its chain with a number of others like the fruit of a bizarre tree and examined it.

“Eight thousand, seven hundred, sixty hours a year, ’17 was a ninty years back…” he calculated aloud. “That’s turning the watch back nine hundred thousand, twenty-two hundred and eighty times.”

He winced and cocked his head to one side.

“Usually, I don’t use this method for more than a month. Popping back over a century, that complicates things.”

“You’re just going straight back there.” Donna said. It wasn’t a question. “You don’t need to… prepare or anything?”

“This _is_ preparing.” Smith said defensively. “I’ve got everything I need waiting for me in 1917. It’s all in the shop.”

He sighed explosively and sat down on stack of computer towers.

“…I can’t use the watch method. I _like_ the watch method! It’s accurate to the hour! It takes the shop with me! I _need_ my shop to keep things from getting messy. I _hate_ it when things get messy!”

Donna looked around the complete and utter disaster that was Smith’s back room and dryly commented, “I can see that.”

A thought occurred to her.

“Wait a minute, skinny,” Donna exclaimed, pulling on Smith’s arm, “If I’m in the shop, and the watch sends the shop back to 1917, does that bring me back to 1917?”

“It should.” he muttered, pouting at his pocketwatch. “That’s the trouble with time travel, it takes so much time…”

“Then you’re taking me with you?”

“What, did you expect me to do all the work?” Smith sounded offended. “Once we get to 1917, we still need to find Wilf and sort out whatever sent him back to the First World War in the first place!” Donna looked at him like he had gone insane.

“Your help will be reflected in the price, of course.” Smith added.

“Price?” Donna asked. Smith blinked at her.

“I’m a wizard for hire. That means payment. Bread costs money in every century.”

The two stared blankly at one another for a moment. Bizarrely, Donna had the feeling one of them should be making tea, but she didn’t know where the kettle was and Smith was otherwise occupied.

“You said ‘this method’ for time travel. You meddle with that watch in some way, and you’re in another time. Is that what you’re asking me to believe?”

Smith didn’t look up from where he was picking up pieces of the tech that littered the room, bent over a stack so that Donna had to address his skinny posterior rather than his face. And, upon occasion, a Chuck Taylor as he lost his balance and stuck out a foot to catch himself.

“You hired the time wizard, mate, if you didn’t believe in this, why did you come here?” Smith asked, remaining in that position.

“I believe in magic! And I believe in time travel, I’d be an idiot not to, something took my granddad and popped him in World War I, fat lot of good saying ‘magic’s not real’ is gonna do.” Donna snapped defensively. “What I’m having a little more trouble believing is you know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, I absolutely do not know that.” Smith admitted cheerfully. “That’s why I’ve got to change the system around every time I cast a circle, if I start thinking I’ve got it figured out it stops working.”

He finally stood up, arms full of assorted cords.

“Give me a hand with the USBs, would you? They go all ‘bout the perimeter, but don’t plug them in yet. They’ve got to plugged in widdershins. Or is it the other one, dorsal? Forget it, they’ve got to be plugged in counter clockwise or the circle will try to send us _forward_ in time to 1917.” Smith explained, fumbling with his full arms to push a bundle of assorted USB charge cords bought from assorted gas stations into Donna’s hand. “See if you can get them in a rainbow, would you?”

“What does that do to the spell?”

“I don’t know. Probably nothing, it just looks nicer that way.” he shrugged.

“Sorry, it just occurred to me, this making things up as you go is going to get very old very fast.” Donna said crossly.

“Hasn’t yet, not for me at least.” Smith said lightly, arranging the coiled phone cords into sigils on the dusty carpet. Lacking a fair reason not to do as he said, Donna picked out a red USB extender cord and attached it to an orange one.

“How much is this going to cost? I mean, I’ll pay it, he’s my grandfather.” Donna added quickly, “Whatever it is, I’ll find a way.”

“I’m not going to take much, it’s not fair to say you need to pay more money than you see in a year or you’ll never see your grandfather alive again. That’s not a rescue, that’s extortion. Wait… what year am I in?”

“2007.” said Donna.

“Ah, so some countries _do_ still do that. I forgot. That reminds me,” he said with a wince, “Avoid 2013-2021 if you ever go forward in time. Just skip it. You can’t help them, I’ve tried.”

“But you said you needed payment. That you needed to eat.”

“That’s just it, I need to eat. I don’t really cook, we-ell, I _can_ you but I don’t want to. You need to eat things after you cook them, and that’s already been such a fuss. Plus it’s a lot more fun to try the local cuisine, whether you’re travelling in time or space. So for as long as it takes for us to find Wilf, you’re buying.” His face broke into a grin. “Friends discount. ‘Cause it’s for Wilf.”

Smith bounced up on his heels and surveyed his handiwork.

“Not bad for a rush job. How is that outer limiter coming?”

“Do you mean am I done sticking a bunch of charging cables together? I’ve gotten around to the blue ones.”

“Good, good. Keep going, I’m almost done with the centre.” he said cheerfully. “Don’t connect the last one to the first before I say so. Oh, and be sure you’re standing _inside_ the circle when you do that.”

“When you said you were going to cast a magic circle, I was picturing something with chalk and runes.”

“ _Well_ ,” he all but meowed, “It’s, what did you say, 2007 innit? Wizards have moved forward a bit from sygils drawn in chalk and calling on demons. Demons are terrible with time, anyhow, computers are what you need. Same thing really, but without the brimstone. Hold all the knowledge of the universe, but you need to ask them very precise questions to get the answers you need.”

As he said all this, Smith tapped a careful calculation into a wired keyboard that wasn’t connected to anything. Once he was done, he carefully and quickly plugged it into a wall charger as if it might explode. It didn’t, and he plugged the wall charger into a surge protector plugged into itself.

“Runes, well, those are just letters that got old enough to sound important. I’ve got millions of those running through all this lot, well, not runes exactly, but ASCII works better if it’s going to be put through an actual cord.” As he said this, he took an adaptor out of his pocket and used it to plug the power cords from two old computer monitors into each other. In defiance of everything except the fact he was a time wizard, the monitors blinked to life with that faint hiss of old vacuum tubes and lines of ASCII started running across their screens, white on black.

“Right, that’s everything. Got the outer limiter?”

“I have a circle of USB cords arranged in a rainbow, with the last one not plugged in.”

“Perfect. Now just—whoa, just stand _inside_ the circle with me, it’s not safe to be a bystander…” Smith reached forward and pulled Donna to stand in the circle he’d “drawn” by putting an old mouse cord to end, “Perfect, that’s where you want to be standing.”

Donna muttered under her breath about where she wanted to be standing, stepped inside the circle, and plugged in the last USB cord.

Then, in a flash of white light, everything changed.

“First things first…” came Smith’s voice out of the blinding whiteness. “I think we’ve earned a cup of tea, don’t you?”


	3. Tea Break

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a moment, Donna doubts something.

Smith perched on a stack of filing boxes holding a mug of steaming black tea blazoned with the text “I’m roadkill on the information superhighway” with a picture of Garfield the cat looking rather worse for the wear. Donna watched him carefully over her own cup, dreading the results of the third of a cup of sugar he’d added affecting his already hyperactive personality. Part of her brain was quietly explaining to an second, disinterested part that her host was most certainly either bi or asexual, because no straight person sat like they had only rented their legs for a weekend and didn’t know how they worked yet and in her experience gay people would have selected an actual chair to sit badly in.

She set down her own tea ( “Welcome to hell. Here’s your copy of Windows.” the mug proclaimed in cheerful red letters) on the floor, afraid to add it to any of the precarious stacks around her.

“So your telling me this is 1917?”

“Ye-p.”

“It looks a lot like 2007.” Donna replied dryly.

“Of course it does. We’re still in the back room of my shop. I’ve got to hide all this futuristic kit in back, else I’d mess up the future with people trying to figure out how to make a floppy disk before they invent computers to put them in.” Smith took a long sip of his tea and looked seriously at Donna.

“There’s one thing I haven’t figured out, though.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Usually by now if I take someone with me in time they’re either ‘oh wow I’ve travelled in time I’ve got to see everything and look at everything and poke butterflies to see if it’ll stop my granddad being born’ or ‘You jut set off a bit of flashpaper we haven’t travelled in time at all, I want my money back you charlatan.’ You aren’t doing either of those things. And at this point it’s gotten so I don’t know if someone believes they’ve travelled in time until they do.”

“Are you asking me if I think you’ve brought us back in time or not?” Donna asked.

“Do you?” he asked.

“And how do you expect me to decide that when all you’ve shown me is evidence that wizard or not, you’re definitely a hoarder, and where you keep your kettle. If you’re gonna try and stop me from trying to find my granddad or get a look at 1917, then I’ll start to think the only thing you did with my time was waste it.”

“So you haven’t decided if I’m faking being a wizard or not.”

“It’s not impossible, is it?” Donna retorted. She took a sip of her tea. “I don’t think you’re a faker, but I haven’t decided whether or not I think you’re an idiot.” Smith frowned and nodded.

“Sounds like you’ve got a pretty good measure of me, then.”

The wizard bounced off of his perch and landed in a clearing in the mess.

“Thanks for the tea, Donna. Casting yourself back nearly a century takes it out of you.”

“But you made the tea.” she asked, sounding confused and irritated by the confusion.

“Oh, not that tea.” Smith explained, “You’re going to end up buying me a lot of tea by the time we find Wilf. Might as well get on that, we’ve got a lot of ground to search for one soldier and there’s no time like the past.” He strode briskly towards the front room.

“Wait!” Donna exclaimed. Smith paused.

“Won’t we… be a little conspicuous if this really is 1917?” she asked. “I mean, I’m wearing jeans and you…” she gestured at him, tight suit, bug-eye goggles, and Converse All Stars. “…you were pretty strange looking in 2007.”

“What’s wrong with my suit?”

“And if I’m going to be buying you all the tea you can drink, aren’t the cafés going to notice I’m trying to do it with bank notes printed in 2000?” Donna added.

“Look, it’s natural to be nervous the first time you go back in time.” Smith smiled, showing more warmth and humanity in that moment than he had the entire time he had while casting them back into the past. He put a comforting hand on Donna’s shoulder. “I’m an old hand at this. I’ve been in and out of the past more times than I can count, mostly because I’ve never bothered to count. It’s not as complex as you’d think. Just stick with me and you’ll be alright.”

Two hours later, detained by the police for their strange behaviour and with no valid form of identification, Donna shot another deadly glare across the bench at Smith, who smiled sheepishly at her.

“See? We’ve already gotten quite close to the local military. I think things are going beautifully.”


	4. Another Fine Mess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Donna and Smith are questioned by the local army.

“I should have known this was headed to trouble the second I saw you. This thin streak of nothing says he can travel in time, and what do I do? Do I turn the other way? No! I agree to buy him lunch and we’re not back in time for fifteen whole minutes and we’re being questioned by military police!”

“You might want to keep your voice down about the ‘time travelling’ part.” Smith grimaced.

“And what happened to ‘We’ve prepared for everything, the 1910s are a breeze’?!” snapped Donna, not following Smith’s advice.

“They usually are!” Smith defended. “I don’t know what happened, I’ve spent _weeks_ here without gathered any unwanted attention, I don’t know how things got this bad this fast.”

Donna opened her mouth to berate Smith further, but as a serious-looking man in an even more serious-looking uniform approached them, she paused with her mouth open and her finger pointed accusingly towards the wizard.

A stern looking man with a stern looking moustache stood stiffly before them with his hands folded behind his back. Donna knew almost nothing about first World War uniforms, but he looked slightly more impressive than the soldiers that arrested them, so she figured he must be important, and he probably believed that he had better things to do then look crossly at two civilians who had been taken off the street. She figured correctly.

“I suppose you’ve had enough time to come up with an explanation for what you were doing in Duke’s Meadows when we found you?” he asked. Then, brandishing four of Smith’s USB cords in his face, “And what _these_ are?”

“Sh-short range telegraph wires.” Smith stuttered, leaning back from the bouquet of wires like they were live snakes. “Of my own design. I was running a test of new equipment…” his eyes flashed around the room nervously, “…assisted by my sister, Sarah, naturally.”

“Naturally.” said the soldier crossly.

“I’m an inventor, you see, bit of a scientist, thought that I could help the war effort by perfecting the design.”

“More than the war effort would be aided by another soldier signing up?”

“…I’m… underweight.”

“I’ll say you are.” Donna muttered.

“I don’t see what the trouble is.” said Smith defensively, “Those papers are official and up-to-date, signed by a brigadier, there shouldn’t have been any trouble at all.”

“I saw the signature,” said the moustachioed man, “It even matches the signature of Lethbridge-Stewart exactly. The only trouble is, _I don’t remember signing it.”_

Smith’s face crumpled into an expression of horror, and without taking another beat he turned to Donna and exclaimed, “I _told_ you that man wasn’t a real notary! ‘We need our papers nice and official, above board’, I said but no! ‘Mickey’s cheaper! I knew him in school!’ you said!”

“You can save your performance, Mr. Smith.” said Lethbridge-Stewart crossly, “I’m not the one you need to impress. You are your ‘sister’ will be questioned, separately, by my best man. An absolute tyrant of a man, as firm as steel. All the little details in your story that don’t add up will be quite the tidy sum when he’s finished with you.”

He smiled, evidently quite pleased with himself, and raised his voice.

“Come in now, sergeant Mott.” Lethbridge-Stewart announced. A small, kindly-looking old man entered the room, wearing a sergeant’s uniform and a weary expression. Despite the unusual setting, there was no mistaking him: the solider from the little black and white photograph Donna brought into the time wizard’s shop. It was Wilf.

Donna and Smith both stared agape at him as he entered the room.

“Result!” Smith chirped.

**Author's Note:**

> This is Human-nxture's fault. I can't turn down either a meme or a request for more to be added to a drabble.


End file.
